I’m having a both literal and figurative windfall in my garden, with trees chucking leaves and seeds everywhere. Each Autumn breeze rains a barrage that makes me jump every time something hits my roof.
My cozy little shack is an enlarged garage apartment behind my main house which I rent out because it’s too roomy for just me; the unique “tiny house” was designed by renowned landscape architect Rick Griffin who specializes in pool houses and other distinctive outbuildings.
It’s so small that recently I suspected there being a roof rat in my attic, which was chewing stuff so loudly the walls reverberated. Turned out to be a squirrel gnawing on a deer antler sculpture mounted on a massive swing support attached to the porch, which resonated throughout the entire cabin.
Anyway, Rick and I created a one-off rustic cypress bungalow which has, among other folksy touches including a kitchen tower, both a metal roof and antique pressed tin ceilings. So, every falling acorn, day and night, sounds like an amplified .22 ricochet.
Most end up raked or blown into the compost pile along with fallen leaves, spent flowers, weeds, and kitchen scraps, but a few get picked out to start in pots for plant swaps and civic projects, and a few I sell to garden centers. I mean, how hard can it be to start seeds that manage to sprout themselves with no human help out in the woods?
Turns out, it can be a bit tricky. With the exception of plump woodland buckeye seeds, which can sprout within days of being potted up and watered and can get six or eight inches tall before winter, most native tree seeds go through one or two simple but necessary natural treatments before they will germinate. Both are easy to mimic by gardeners.
Technically they are called scarification and cold stratification. The first is necessary because the flesh of some fruits, including magnolias, dogwoods, and peaches suppresses germination and has to be removed; you can’t just plant the whole fruits. In nature, they get cleaned through the digestive systems of birds and other fruit-eating wildlife, but I just soak them overnight and then rub out and clean the seeds thoroughly (love magnolia fruits’ fruity fragrance). This, by the way, isn’t necessary for pecans, acorns, maples, mimosas, or other naked seeds.
The second makes a lot sense when you think about: with the exceptions of those buckeyes, if seedling emerge late in the fall they will likely be too tender to survive winter freezes, so they are genetically programed to wait until warm weather rolls back around. They mark time by the number of cold hours they experience; once they get a few hundred hours of cool temperatures they will quickly sprout in the warm soils of Spring.
You can bury cleaned seeds in small pots and leave them outside for the winter, like squirrels do, which is what I did decades ago while working at a tree nursery. We set the pots in a protected spot for the winter and covered them with hardware cloth to keep vermin from feasting on them.
Or this can be faked by putting the cleaned seeds, along with a barely damp piece of paper towel for humidity, in the refrigerator for three or four months, then plant them in the late winter or spring.
I now have three dozen pots of buckeyes already coming up, and magnolia and dogwood seeds in the fridge. Now I’m just waiting for the rest to fall, to cut out the 24/7 gunshot reports that keep banging on my roof.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
